Build Up
I have been working on my on and off website Hmmburger for the past year and change. It’s let me focus on doing a thing, and recently the thing was finishing another zine.
Hmmburger?
Hmmburger is a way for me to have a quarterly zine of my creations under a silly name. Hmmburger, in spirit, started as an everything and nothing website and after this past year I’ve managed to get back to that. It has created a half-decent foundation for a consistent creative practice that forces me to create and put words to my works. A new type of play, perhaps.
y tho?
Two key things led to me forcing myself to take it seriously: disillusionment and burnout from work, and the general degradation of the internet experience. It was time to take my creative desires and my technical frustrations to task and I learned a lot over the last year working on Hmmburger.
like what?
One of the first lessons: world building is extremely fun and it becomes a challenge when you have various offshoots that you want to explore. During the early stages of Hmmburger, there was a bit more of a fantastical backstory and setting for Hmmburger. That setting slowly became the backdrop to what is my first serialized story, but I wanted to keep practicing, so I allowed Hmmburger to simply exist as it needed to.
Outside of a general creative practice, it allowed me to poke around with web technology with no objective in mind, and to experiment with some concepts that could, in theory, make work a bit easier. Unfortunately, I learned that it may be better to dip than put energy where it’s not appreciated.
damb
Yeah, I know, some key things I sort of thought about:
- Creating for yourself. It’s so damn important; especially in an era of slop abundance.
- A decent internet is out there on the small web and there are some interesting discussions happening.
- Websites could be better, getting a website online seems easier than ever, but some websites need to chill out.
- After the collapse of Twitter, ActivityPub and the ATProtocol are doing neat things that feel in the spirit of the internet.
- Journaling is awesome, it got Hmmburger going again!
Maybe in the future I will take my journal entries on these subjects and turn them into posts here or in a future issue of Hmmburger.
so…
So here we are a bit over a year later, still kicking and no sign of stopping, and releasing the third Hmmburger zine! It’s heavy in the visuals and a little light on the stories, but it’s full color, I had fun laying it out, and I had fun making what’s in it. You can of course download and read it for free at hmmburger.com.
